On An Outline

Reading Heidegger:
of Remarks to the Essex
Colloquium

JACQUES DERRIDA
Ecole des Hautes Études en SciencesSociales

(Editorial Note: Jacques Derrida did not read a formal paper at the Essex
Colloquium but presented some remarks on "Reading Heidegger" based
on conversations of April, 1986, at Yale University, with Tom Keenan,
Tom Levin, Tom Pepper, and Andrzej Warminski. David Farrell Krell
has provided a brief outline of Professor Derrida's remarks, followed by a
transcript of the discussion.)

Four threads are to be drawn out here, emanating from four areas of
hesitation and disquiet in my current reading of Heidegger:
1. The privilege of questioning in Heidegger's thought and the gesture of
'
affirmation,;
II. The privilege of essencein Heidegger's account of technique and the
necessary contamination of essences; ° "
III. The thought of life and animality in Heidegger's ontology;
IV. The thought of epochality and epochal suspension in
Heidegger's history of Being.

I. The privilege of questioning in Heidegger's thought and the gesture of

affirmation,.
A. The question is privileged everywhere by Heidegger as the mode
of thinking.
. 1. Heidegger often redoubles the question-"Why the why ?"-
yet never doubts its dignity: the Denkweg is always a way of -'
questioning.
2. That way appears to be subjected to both teleology and .

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archaeology: for even in errancy there may well be orienta-

tion, destining, and-above all-provenance (Herkunft). -
3. Such insistence on the questioning way would in that case
limit the being under way of questioning.
B. My own gesture is to sketch a movement of thinking, tracing,
writing, that begins in affirmation.
1. Questioning is a particular form of discourse-one could
perform a grammatical, rhetorical, and pragmatical analysis
of it.
2. In addition to what Heidegger calls das Gefragte, das Befragte,
and das Erfragte, there must be someone or something else
(quelqu'un d'autre] involved in questioning: there is the call of
the other (l'appel de I'autre] that precedes, must precede, philos-
ophy and the path of thinking.
a) For Heidegger, Sein is the "totally other," and yet such
- otherness is not totally unrelated to the Socratic/Platonic
tradition.
b) It is necessary to pursue what in Was hei/3tDenken? Heideg-
ger calls verheissen,"promise."
3. The moment I set out on a path of thinking there is already
the trace of the other; the trace calls for questioning yet does
- not itself pose questions.
4. The trace is an ever-renewed affirmation of questioning: "Yes,
one must question!" and "Yes, one must question again!" The
"yes" of affirmation must always be confirmed by a second
"yes": affirmation promises the memory of itself.
5. Yet by the very necessity of such repetition, affirmation is
inevitably exposed to the menace of supplementarity, parasit-
ism, technique-in a word, contamination.

> II. The privilege of essencein Heidegger's account of technique and the
necessary contamination of essence.
A. Heidegger avers that the essence of technique is nothing techno-
logical : his thinking of technique as such and as an essencetries in a
classically philosophical manner to shelter the thought and
language of essence from contamination.
B. Yet can anything in language and in thought be sheltered
absolutely from technicity? In the very will to protect oneself
against "x" one is more exposed to the danger of reproducing
"x" than when one tries to think contamination.
C. Contamination, a contagion born of contact and a kind of
touching, foils every strategy of protection; it puts at risk the

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central theme of Heidegger's thinking-that of the ontological

difference.
1. Being's difference from beings is itself dissimulated in beings,
and thus appears to be a kind of contamination. Yet Heideg-
ger would insist that contamination is merely an "ontic"
scheme, a mere "metaphor."
2. The Heideggerian figure of Being's self-veiling, its with-
drawal, reserve, reticence, holding-back, may well be a
strategy of protection.
3. Contamination requires the thinking of a kind of différance that
is not yet or no longer ontological difference.

III. The thought of life and animality in Heidegger's ontology.

A. Heidegger's unceasing effort to discredit Lebensphilosophiesuggests
that the question of life disturbs almost all of his analyses and
conceptual distinctions.
1. The thesis, "The animal is poor in world," from the 1929/30
lecture course, remains problematic: the animal's intermedi-
'
ate position (between stone and human being) reproduces an
ancient conceptual scheme and involves the classical machin-
ery of mediation.
a) Heidegger tries to subordinate all the sciences and regional
ontologies to fundamental ontology.
b) He tries to insist on access to the as such (the essence) as the
distinguishing mark of humanity.
2. There is no such thing as Animality, but only a regime of
differences without opposition. The concept of animality,
along with the "world poverty" of the animal, are human
artifacts, indeed, artifacts that are difficult to wield; and their
effect is to efface differences, to homogenize.
B. In addition to the ontological framework, one must analyze the
political and institutional context of Heidegger's opposition to
Lebensphilosophie.
1. In spite of Heidegger's insistence that all the sciences must
submit to the philosopher-metaphysician, who alone thinks
their essence, Heidegger fails to challenge the traditional
division of the university into departments or faculties.
2. Yet this is not to deny that Heidegger's thinking-in spite of
1933 and in spite of his silence on the Holocaust, a silence as
monstrous as that about which he remained silent-still has a
deconstructive role to play in our political life, especially in
the academy.

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IV. The thought of epochality and epochal suspension in

Heidegger's history of Being.
A. For Heidegger, "epoch" is the movement in which Being gives
itself by dissimulating itself, holding itself back in reserve even as
it shows itself.
B. Although an epoch is not a historiological period, it is still a large
ensemble or totality gathered toward a single sense.
1. In Einfuhrung in die Metaphysik Heidegger argues that Plato's
xwea is confluent with the determination of Being as 16£a and
that it prepares the way for Descartes' res extensa. Yet might not
xdlga resist both conventional Platonism and modernity?
2. In Satz vom Grund he argues that the principle of sufficient
reason pertains to an epoch dominated by the subject-object
relation, representedness, and Ge-stell. Yet Spinoza, precisely
in the name of reason, develops a thought that is not of the
subject, not of representedness, not of sufficient reason, not of
certitude, not of finalism. And Heidegger largely ignores him.
C. These forced moves and silences on Heidegger's part cause us to
hesitate in the face of his powerful and otherwise extremely
convincing epochal organization.

These are the four threads. The question at the end is whether we can or
should knot them together. Perhaps we should, after the manner of
Heidegger, try to think these four threads, not as a unity, but as a Geflecht
or weave....

DISCUSSION
P. Crowther: I have to confess that I found myself profoundly shocked by
your discourse, if only for the reason that to read you in the printed
word has proved an enormously difficult task, whereas listening to
you today has proved enormously easy. Now, is this just a reflection
of the contingencies of the situation-presenting some remarks to this
confcrcncc----or does this mark a change in your approach to decon-
struction ?
J. Derrida: What do you mean by being shocked?
P. Crowthen Well, just surprised, puzzled.... The fact that there is such
a difference between your written text and your verbally presented
text.
J. Derrida: That's the reason I attend colloquia. It has to do, of course,
with what I said at the beginning: it was an oral presentation,

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intended to open discussion. I think that the written texts, which you
seem to prefer, usually are more difficult to question, more protective,
strategically more clever, or "rused," and this limits discussion. And
further, it is fair just to open up, to deal in a straightforward way,
with all these problems, presupposing that some of you have read my
texts, the written texts, so that there could be an exchange between
the written implication and the oral performance. But what do you
mean by being shocked? Did you find the oral too great a simplifica-
tion ?
P. Crowther: When I read your texts I sense exactly the things you were
talking about, a sense of strategy, quite willful. Now you've reversed
. that and talked in a very open way. I thought for a long time I was
listening to an Oxford analytic philosopher, so that is probably the
reason for my shock. But I am also interested in the fact that you
finished by going into an ethical dimension. I wonder whether it has
to do with the openness of a colloquium?
J. Derrida: No, no. I often ask myself ethical questions.
P. Crowther. You ask yourself them, but you don't ...
J. Derrida: No, in the background there are many texts with which many of
you, perhaps all of you, are familiar. The paradox is that this very
easy and straightforward speech is at the same time very formalized,
that is, implies many hidden complicities. I thought I would try
strategically to reach the points that are at stake. Whether I suc-
ceeded or not I do not know, but that was my intention. And this
implied a tacit formalization, notwithstanding the really "everyday"
style.
P. Crowther: It was an everyday style, but it wasn't everydayness.
G. Bennington: I wanted to pick up on the notion of the yes and affirmation. -
I understand your point about challenging Heidegger when he says
that the essence of technology is not technological. Your move with
respect to that is to say, well, yes it is.... But then you seem to
operate on the question of the question in a way that is not dissimilar
to what you seem to be reproaching Heidegger for on the question of
technology. On the question of the question, you are the one who
seems to say the essence of the question is not interrogative but
affirmative.
J. Derrida: Not the essence, not the essence. No, the happening of a
questioning discourse is something a?rmative; it is a situation, a
scene, in which you have to affirm, to say "Yes, I am questioning," or
"I prefer the question to the dogma, or to the position; I prefer it."
And this is the happening of a sort of contract. I won't say it is a
contract, but when you ask a question, the first question, the question

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of the question, you have already decided that it is good to speak, for
instance, or that it is good to address the other, that it is better than
not to do so. And even if you don't explicitly say "yes," you imply
this affirmation-that it is better to address the other than not to,
better to ask questions than not ask them.
G. Bennington: But insofar as that yes or that affirmation is always already
contaminated by the possibility of repetition-mimesis, miming, hesi-
tation, various thoughts of this kind-then presumably that yes, or
that affirmation., is not understandable in opposition to a "no" or a
negation. Affirmation wouldn't work in an oppositional way.
J. Derrida: Yes, that is right. It is not symmetrical with negation.
G. Bennington: But then I'm a bit unsure about this choice as to what is
"better." Might it not be that one is in a position where there is no
choice? In the absence of the possibility of opposing that yes, or that
. choice, to a no, to a refusal or a negation, where does that leave the
notion of choice? Is there not a pathos attached to your yes? And could
one not imagine a version that would have a different sort of pathos,
one attached to a no, using the same sequence of possibilities of
repetition, mime, and so on? If one could construct a similar argu-
ment, where one says that what opened the question was a no, a no
that was always already affected by the possibility of contamination,
how different would that be from your saying that what opens the
question is a yes?
J. Derrida: The no is not opposed to the yes in the case you mention.
There is no symmetry between them. Even the no implies the yes.
When you say "no," taking the most negative stand, engaging in the
most negative discourse, the yes to which I am referring now is
implicated. That is, not that it is better-"better" is a mode of
translation of what I am saying-not that it is "better" to speak, or to
address the other, than not to. It is not a matter of Mya06v, the
"good." It is the mere fact or experience of addressing the other, of
speaking, even if to say, 'No, no, no, no, no', as a devil.... I am
referring to Ulysses, to l'esprit qui dit non. Even in this perspective of
_ absolute negativity, absolute negativity implies an affirmation., the
kind of affirmation I am referring to. And this affirmation cannot
occur without a repetition, thus without a contamination, and so on.
So, this yes is not a value, not an affirmation of a value, not an ethical
stance. It is something implied by every trace. That is why I do not
speak of speech acts, because usually these imply the line between
animality and humanity. As soon as there is a trace traced, there is
such an affirmation, what I call affirmation in this case.
G. Bennington: What I'm really interested in is to what extent the affirm-

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tion isn't just, let's say, a necessity.What you're calling the affirmation
might simply be a necessity.
J. Derrida: Yes. Sometimes I write necessity with a capital N. That is to
say that it is a singular necessity, not simply the law, but Necessity,
the other which I cannot escape. And, in the present case, affirmation, .
such affirmation means Necessity. You cannot but have already
traced the trace, and this has to do with a singular experience, with
'Avayx?, a singular situation, whose singularity is Necessity. But it
, is not affirmation in the linguistic sense. It is not really "yes." "Yes"
is a translation, a linguistic translation, of what I call affirmation.
D. Simon-Williams: I was very struck by your mentioning trace and veil at
the end of your remarks, because I feel that it is possible actually to
take those two in a sense together. Especially in "veil" there is this
reference to a source of experience that actually doesn't call for
affirmation or negation. And I think that it is something one finds in .
. trace as well. I know "trace" is a very difficult idea, that it is more
something in the sense of imprint, mould; but both veil and trace
somehow link up together in an upsurge of something, something
irreducible to technicity, technology, technicality, something that
grants the possibility of seeing and touching. And I think that there is
a link that seems to have its original place in a very undefined space
of experience, a being at the source, a re-sourcing.
J. Derrida: Yes. First, I would not say that the trace is described the way it
should be described when you speak of imprint, mould. I think the
trace differently. Of course, the word trace doesn't mean anything by
itself. But the model of imprinting, mould, etc., of is one
particular mode of determining the trace-and it is not mine, would
I
say. On the contrary, I am trying to deconstruct this model and even
the model of the vestige, the footprint in the sand. I would prefer
something which is neither present nor absent: I would prefer ashes as
the better paradigm for what I call the trace-something which
erases itself totally, radically, while presenting itself. So that would be
the first repercussion of what you call the trace. Then, as to techni-
cality and touching, contamination.... Of course, what happens
with modem technology is that it deprives us of the possibility of
touching. But what scares Heidegger is not the fact that we cannot
touch anymore; it is not that he would like to protect the possibility of
touching; but it is the contamination between touching and nontouch-
ing, between the authentic human way of touching, the way a Dasein
touches, and another way of touching-not-touching. That is a conta-
mination which he would like to avoid, contamination between
touching in the human sense and touching in the nonhuman sense,

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technical, animal, or whatever. That's why I insisted on the strange

combination between contact, a kind of contact, and another kind of
contact or noncontact. Whereas he would like to draw a limit
between an authentic touching and an inauthentic touching. And
that is what leaves me perplexed. I think there is a contamination,
there has always been a contamination between touching and not
touching.
H. Lubasz: May I ask whether you could say something more about the
political potential you see in Heidegger? I was very puzzled by
your saying that, and I just want to say briefly why. It seems to me
that in many ways Heidegger wants to circumscribe, circumvent,
avoid animality and the Lebenswelt. He wants to circumvent not the
essence of technology but technology itself. But I do not remember
any comment by Heidegger that I would regard as a relevant,
original, penetrating comment about anything in the German politi-
cal situation. So where do you see the potential for some political
illumination?
J. Derrida: As you can imagine, the concept of potentiality is rather
obscure here: what is potentiality in the present case? If it's too
potential, it's nothing. So, what do I mean by potentiality ? To answer
your question, I should point out something which is not only
potential, but which is actual, otherwise it is all too indeterminate. I
don't agree with you when you say that he never said anything
relevant to German political history, even during the thirties. I think
that, if we had time, we could show that he-indirectly, in his own
manner, and so on-perhaps put the good questions. Perhaps. Are
we sure today that we can understand what Nazism was, without
asking all the questions, the historial questions, Heidegger asks? I am
not sure. I am not sure that we have today really understood what
Nazism was. And if we have to think and think about that, I believe
we will have to go through, not to stop, at Heidegger's questions, go
through Heidegger's trajectory and his project. We cannot understand
what Europe is and has been during this century, what Nazism has
been, and so on, without integrating what made Heidegger's dis-
course possible. And then you will have to read Heidegger to see what
has occurred. In all these questions of praxis, poiisis, Volk, etc., the fact
that Heidegger does not propose a political philosophy as such
doesn't mean that he was simply "out"; probably he was thinking
that politics and political philosophy were not capable of thinking
what was happening in Europe at the time. I think that there is a real
potential in meditating on what has happened: it is, of course,
diflicult for me to improvise on that. Yet he was not simply out of the

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field. Who could have been? How? But all the questions he was dealing
with had to do with Nazism, with the history of Western culture,
with Marxism, with capitalism, with technology. How could you say
he was simply outside the question?
H. Lubasz: I didn't say that. What I said was: Nothing that Heidegger
says has any bearing on anything that happened in Europe in the last
hundred years. What I'm asking is: How can you find potential for
political illumination in what Heidegger says?
J. Derrida : What do you mean by illumination? I'll tell you what I think in
a very, very rough way. I do not find in any discourse whatsoeverin this
century anything illuminating enough for this period. And if there is
nothing in Heidegger, who-I ask you, it is a question-or what
discourse are you referring to now which gives you satisfactory
illumination for what has happened or is happening now? I must
confess....
H. Lubasz: I think it's fair to turn the question around on me, but it was
'
you who said there was a potential for political illumination, under-
standing, or insight.
.
J. Derrida: Potential for questions, yes, for questions. Questions addressed
to, let us say, technology, to Marxism, to the political discourses
which are now available, none of them being, as far as I can see,
satisfactory. So I can find help in Heidegger for questioning all the
discourses which are today dominating the scene. That is what I call
potentiality. This doesn't mean that he has a message or a political
program that we could apply, or find simply available. No, no,
certainly not. But he has a deconstructing strength which is very
useful for so many discourses which possess some authority today in
our Western culture.
J. Ree: I'm very interested in your putting educational institutions, I
won't say at the center, but giving them some importance as a place
of practical struggle. People might say, "Why think that anything
important is happening there today, when all the important things
are happening elsewhere?" I would like to ask you about the word
institution, to which you recurred quite a lot. Is it true to say that that
word has for you some special importance?
J. Derrida: No. I don't like the word. It is an easy word, referring to too
many things we are supposedto understand. I think the word institution
is a problem. But I use it, as with so many other words, as a tool, as a
provisional tool, in this context. But, of course, as you know, Heideg-
ger has a very powerful meditation on institution, on Stehen, Stiftung,
etc., and so to define exactly what we are speaking about we would
have to go through this meditation on Stiftung, instituting. What does

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this word mean? Does it imply a contract, for example? Well, in

-
short, I wouldn't retain this word if I had time to elaborate.
J. Sallis: It seems to me that there may be a thread in Heidegger's work
that is not entirely different from the kind of contamination that you
are sketching. What I'm thinking of is the kind of development that
one finds most succinctly in hom Wesender Wahrheit, though also in the
1937/38 lecture course, where Heidegger uses the phrase Wesenheit des
Wesens. In questioning die Wesenheit, Wesen, and Wahrheit, what is
perhaps most important is that "essence" comes no longer to be
determined in a way that simply excludes its opposite, or, I should
say, its opposites, because there are several senses of opposition here.
That is to say, this essence is no longer a simple limit, outside of
which you've got or all the forms of falsehood. Rather,
essence is redetermined as involving the Unwesen, the Gegenwesen;that,
of course, then leads into the question of die Irre, errancy, and so on. It
does seem to me that there is something like a kind of contamination
of essence going on here, something quite different from the demand
for purity.
J. Derrida: I am not sure that Heidegger would say that in the case you
mention it is impurity. There are many places in which he says, for
instance, Wahrheit ist Unwahrheit, la vérité de la vérité est la
non-verite.... So this reversal, or this quasi-negation, or non-identity
of essence with itself, is not contamination, I would say. It is a
reversal, it is the Un-. But is it what I call contamination? I'm not so
sure. It is still too pure, too rigorously delimited. It is not simply a
dialectical reversal; it is not dialectic in that sense. Nonetheless, it is,
again, something pure: the Unwesenheit, the Unwahrheit, are as pure as
Wesenand Wahrheit. What I am interested in is something out of focus;
in French I would say flou. When, for instance, I use some words or
concepts, such as hymen, for instance, or supplementarily, they are not
simply yes and no concepts, they do-at least they should-introduce
some instability which is not simply of the yes and no, of Wesen and
Unwesen.
J. Sallis: You see, I think that in the notion of errancy there is precisely a
kind of necessary flowing of essence, as it were, over into ... , a kind
of necessary blurring of the distinction between Being and beings.
J. Derrida: But, if I agree with you-and I do agree with you, to some
extent-I still must ask: Why does this blurring of the distinction
have no general effect on all of Heidegger's discourse? Because, when
you say the essence of technology is not technical-and he makes
such types of statements-then you cannot blur the distinction. But
if, in errancy, there is a situation in which this blurring occurs not by

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accident but unavoidably, this should have effects on the whole

corpus, on the whole discourse. In that case you couldn't any longer
draw such a rigorous distinction between the essence and that of
which it is the essence. So, you can imagine the consequences of this .
contamination. Of course, I am not advocating the blurring of all
distinctions! No, on the contrary. I am just asking the question. You
have to take into account the possibility of the blurring of distinctions,
even if you do not blur them. And then the whole rhetoric, the whole
scenography changes; the whole style of discourse, all the procedures
of demonstration, of affirmation, of drawing conclusions, are dif-
ferent. The style of thinking, of philosophizing, changes.
T. 0 'Connon I have a problem about the trace with regard to its difference
from philosophy. You stated that philosophy comes with the trace,
but that the trace is not philosophical. When you talked about the
ontological difference in Heidegger, you were indicating that the
difference here is a difference in kind between ground and the
dissimulation of that ground. Yet it seems to me that what you show
in terms of deconstruction, or deconstructions, is differences in de-
gree, which forbid you to state a difference of kind between trace and
philosophy. In other words, the trace would in some sense be philo-
sophical, if the word philosophical is still an appropriate word to use in
the task of deconstruction. Or is it the case that the word philosophy
must be identified with the enterprise of mastery and, perhaps,
metaphysical presence, which presumably you want to undermine?
J. Derrida: The term philosophy, in that case, would be identified not with a
project of mastery but with a project of È3tLm:1ÍfJ.ll, enquiry, knowl-
edge, science. But you can't say that the trace is philosophical or not
philosophical. The trace is nothing. And the "experience" of the
trace-whether there is such an experience is already a problem. If
the experience of the trace is the experience of presence, then you have
no experience of the trace. The trace is something you cannot
experience as such. But if for the moment we speak easily of the
experience of the trace, then what I said in my remarks is that in the
experience of the trace as such, the experience as such of the trace as
such-precisely the as such does not work any more. The experience is
not philosophical as such; the philosophy comes afterward. Once we
presuppose this experience of the trace and then ask questions in the
style of enquiry-where does that come from? where are we going?
who left this trace? etc.-that science, Even in animal
behavior. Your question also touched on the difference of degree.
That is a difficult question. It is not to avoid the difficulty that I say
this. But in the difference between the difference of degree and the

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difference of kind another difference is blurred. That is what I call

différance, with an "a," which is not a distinction, not a difference,
either in essence or of degree. But there are an indefinite number of
differences in structure, which, by way of contamination, look like
differences of degree; therefore I would go very slowly, without
accepting in advance the opposition between difference of degree and
qualitative difference, because this opposition also has to be ques-
tioned. But this, of course, is a very important question.
J. Llewelyn: In the Grundfragen Heidegger briefly discusses the proposition
that philosophy begins in wonder. You didn't mention the word
wonder today. In Plato and Aristotle, the question is treated as though
wonder were a logical question in search of an answer, or a solution to
a problem. But Heidegger is particularly concerned, of course, with
the that it is of a being, rather than its being nothing. And I have some
difficulty in seeing how you are going to capture that as technology or
technicity. It sounds more like being shocked, if I may use the word
shockedagain, this time in order to translate Staunen. Can you accom-
modate that? How do you accommodate that? This is assuming that
there is something to which we could apply the word wonder, some-
thing like an ontological presupposition for all questions of "why"
and "how."
V. Derrida: I don't know. I'm not sure. We would have to go back to the
whole question of8a'U!J.áçELv, I am not sure that this is an absolutely
specific experience, absolutely original; that it happens with human
. beings at a certain moment, one that could be totally distinguished
from an analogous experience in animals or in human beings when
they are surprised or shocked for other reasons. Is there an abso-
lutely, rigorously original experience of I am not sure.
We have here an enormous corpus linking this experience to the
question of the origin or beginning of philosophy. But I am not sure
we have to accept it as true. Perhaps we have to reinterpret all these
descriptions of the étonnement philosophique,Usually we distinguish this
étonnementphilosophique from all sorts of surprises, or from problems
that we have to solve technically, etc. But is this distinction safe? I am
not so sure. I have the feeling that you were implying that I want to
technologize everything, that I would like to describe technicity in
animal society, and so on. No. I was saying that the limit between
what is technical and what is not technical is not safe, even with the
animals, and even with the very first structures of experience. So, it is
not a way of saying, well, everything is instrumental. No: this is all
meant just to problematize the concept of instrumentality.
J. Llewelyn: It looks as though there might be a possibility of finding some

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kind of purity in this area of the that it is. This is how Heidegger might
respond to what you are saying, even though one doesn't have to
accept what he says. But when you say that something has not yet
been shown to be pure, it has not yet been shown to be impure,
either. Maybe it stands a chance.
J. Derrida: The impurity is not rigorously impure; otherwise everything
would be in place. No, there is no pure technology. Nothing is purely
technical, either.
D. Wood: It seems to me that there are political consequences in what you
are saying about Heidegger's treatment of animals, in the way we
might start to renegotiate the relationship between human animals
and nonhuman animals. But if we were to substitute for a relation of
opposition a relation of differance, or differentiation, and a multipli-
cation of those differences, wouldn't that have an enormous implica-
tion for all those social practices we have that are based on
opposition? And when you think of Auschwitz, which people around
the camp knew about but didn't really know about, because they
pushed it out of their minds.... If you start blurring the difference
between people and animals, if you start to blur the difference
between Auschwitz and battery farms, chicken farms....
J. Derrida: No, on the contrary, you have to multiply the differences, not blur
the differences.
D. Wood: But that doesn't mean that there are more differences.
J. Derrida: More differences, yes. For at the same time you will have to
take into account other discriminations, for instance, between human
society and animal society. There are a lot of things to be said and
done. But there are also other partitions, separations, other than
Auschwitz-apartheid, racial segregation-other segregations within
our Western democratic society. All these differences have to be taken
into account in a new fashion; whereas, if you draw a single or two
single lines, then you have homogeneous sets of undifferentiated
societies, or groups, or structures. No, no I am not advocating the
blurring of differences. On the contrary, I am trying to explain how
drawing an oppositional limit itself blurs the differences, the differance
and the differences, not only between man and animal, but among
animal societies-there are an infinite number of animal societies,
and, within the animal societies and within human society itself, so
many differences. Now, there is the ideology of difference, of genetic
difference within human society which we have to be very careful
about; it cannot be a matter of merely manipulating the ideology of
difference, of course. But this ideology of racism, the genetic or
biologist ideology, again blurs differences; it is not in the end an

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ideology of difference at all, but an ideology of homogeneity, with a

single limit between white and black, Jewish and non-Jewish, etc: So
the discourse I am trying to deconstruct is not a discourse of differ-
ence ; it is a discourse of homogeneity, even if, or precisely because, it
refers to oppositional differences.
S. Houlgate: I also was particularly interested in what you had to say
about the universities. It put me in mind of various eighteenth-
century figures such as Herder, Schiller, or Goethe, who had a similar
interest in undoing certain faculty distinctions both at a philosophical
and in many ways at the university level. Now, the one thing that
differentiates them from you, it seems to me, is a certain code of
language and also their not being afraid to use words like telos, unity,
and wholeness. The terms that you use-dissemination, unsettling,
destabilize, out of focus-possess a certain negativity. And, if that is
the case, does that have something to do with your taking over
Heidegger's or, for that matter, Nietzsche's view that somehow such
talk of unity and wholeness ultimately does suppress the differences?
Whereas it seems to me that one could look at a Herder, a Schiller, a
Hegel, or a Goethe and say exactly the opposite-no, it doesn't
suppress difference,.
Derrida,: First, Heidegger wouldn't say that Versammlung, gathering, sup-
presses difference. On the contrary, there is a way of gathering which
does not reduce the difference. That is why gathering is neither unity
nor identity. There is a gathering which is not systematic, which is
not identifying, so there is some Versammlungwhich is not a repression
of the difference. Now, to go back to those words, "my" words. They
look negative; they are not negative. Dissemination is not negative, the
dis- is not negative. I insist many times on the fact that dissemination
is not negative, that on the contrary it is affirmative, generative. But,
as you correctly noticed, each time I use a word which is grammati-
cally negative, destabilize, for instance, deconstruction, I would not
say that here it is merely an appearance. I would say that it is to be
read in a context where you have to oppose a certain dominant logic
of opposition. And this is also true in politics, where, in order to
displace the question to plane terrain, you have first to oppose, and,
in a very classical way, to reverse the order. You cannot do without
this phase. I often use this rather easy pedagogical scheme, that in
deconstruction there is a first phase in which you have to oppose, to
reverse the order, the hierarchy. Ahd it is a negative move. In politics
you have to violently oppose something before you can neutralize the
opposition, or the previous logic, in order to open the way to another
distribution, prepare another structure. The phase of negation, of

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opposition, cannot be avoided. So when I use negative words, it is

with this strategic goal, with this telos.
S. Houlgate: So that if the appearance of negation has to do with this stage,
you would not feel unhappy to be associated with, let us say, Goethe;
that is, associated with an ideal of unity in difference.
J. Derrida: That is my dream. It is what I try to think. I can't avoid
dreaming, of course.... But I try not to dream all the time.

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